Kudos: A Novel

By Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax.

In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781443447171

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk read English at New College, Oxford. Her first novel Saving Agnes won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1993. She reviews regularly for The Times and TLS.

Reviews for Kudos

[lisahistory · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While the least satisfying of the trilogy, is nevertheless a wonderful continuation of the conversations.

[dooney-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kudos is the third in Rachel Cusk’s trilogy that began with Outline, and in some sense the author has come full circle. In the first book the narrator seemed to be in the process of rediscovering herself, having lost one view of herself, and in this, the final novel, she has reached the goal, only to find that the success itself becomes another loss of self, exploring the way “successful writer” is itself a role outside of the self. Throughout the novel Cusk explores both the internal and external person of the writer, as she absorbs the narrative of others, and they project their narrative onto her. In short, self can never be defined by success, and, as the author rather pointedly reminds us in the final scene, whatever internal or external success we might achieve, it is only the internal that can sustain us as we can never quite escape the roles others assign to us.

[icolford · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In Kudos, the third volume of her brilliant Outline trilogy, Rachel Cusk returns to Faye, a British author of some repute who in this novel is attending a literary festival/conference in a warm, probably Mediterranean, European urban centre that remains unnamed throughout the book. Once again Faye encounters men and women who regale her with accounts of their personal struggles, largely marital in nature, and who speak at length, fluently and without reserve about matters artistic, aesthetic and philosophic. Most of her encounters are with people associated with the festival: other authors, her publisher, journalists. All have deeply personal and sometimes enlightening, sometimes harrowing stories to tell. One, a first-time author with self-esteem issues, narrates her account about the writers’ retreat in Italy she attended, operated by a wealthy widow who gains satisfaction (and ego gratification) from surrounding herself with young male literary celebrities, but who turns vindictive the moment her gift of solitude is rejected. Later, Faye meets with a female journalist who, having been engaged to interview Faye, instead spends the entire time talking about her own sister’s failed marriage. The characters in this novel are all described with grace, wit and visual exactness, as is the anonymous city they inhabit. For all the sharpness and precision of its details however, a divide remains between the reader and the action on the page that the narrative never quite manages to bridge. It begins with the unspecific urban setting (this is not the case with Outline, which is set in Athens, and Transit, set in London). And though everything is filtered through her consciousness, Faye remains somewhat aloof emotionally, and, where personal matters are concerned, withholding, almost to the point of secretiveness. For instance, we learn in an aside from the interviewer who’s obsessed with her sister’s marriage that Faye has remarried, but Faye herself has nothing to say about this. In conversation with another interviewer we learn that Faye’s son has left her to live with his father, but we get nothing beyond the bare fact. For this reason, Kudos strikes a tone of emotional reticence. Faye seems guarded, less willing than previously to share her hopes and fears with the reader. But this in no way diminishes what Rachel Cusk has accomplished in the Outline trilogy. These are milestone works: instantly engaging, fiercely intelligent, searching, original and thoroughly modern novels that cast a wise and jaundiced eye on the literary life, the institution of marriage, parenting, and the battle between the sexes.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the final novel in Cusk's Outline Trilogy, and while most professional reviewers consider it the best, I beg to differ. Don't get me wrong, I really liked Kudos, but I didn't find it as fresh and original as Outline, and it lacked the elements of surprise and humor of Transit. All three novels focus on Faye, a writer. In the first, she is struggling, going to Greece to teach a creative writing course; in the second, she has had some professional success and, post-divorce, has bought a home in a dodgy area of London that needs extensive renovation. In Kudos, she has been asked to be one of the speakers at a self-important writers' conference (meaning, the sponsors and organizers are impressed with themselves and the money they have to bring in some "big names," but it's not really all that prestigious).The structure (or gimmick, if you will) of all three novels is that the narrative is pretty much a string of stories that other people tell Faye. Both Outline and >Kudos begin on an airplane, and we hear one side of the protagonist's conversations with seat mates. Here, most of the conversations are stories told by other authors, guides, and the journalists who are supposed to be conducting interviews. Some linking themes are the relationships between men and women, the difficulties of parenting, the changes in both literature and the publishing business, and, as side note, Brexit. The stories are simultaneously intriguing and mundane, the tellers carefully crafted. Even minus any sense of a plot, Kudos held my attention. One thing I missed here was a connection to the process of writing. For me, Outline seemed to represent the way a writer gathers material as he/she prepares to begin, and Transit exhibited the process of writing and revising subsequent drafts. I'm not sure that Kudos fits into this structure, unless it is a commentary on the rather thankless end result of a successful novel: a series of press stops, conference appearances, interviews, and meetings, none of which are particularly satisfying.I'm still rather puzzled by the last strange episode in the novel, but I think what Cusk is trying to say is that no matter how successful or strong or independent a woman is, in the eyes of men, she is still, first, and foremost nothing but a woman, meaning that she will always be "less than . . . " Men in all three books--even men like the young, clueless interviewer who insists that he intuits from reading her books that Faye must move to his dull, sunburned city--do keep offering unwanted advice and opinions, as if theirs are of superior value.I will agree with one Amazon reviewer who also enjoyed the trilogy but felt that this final installment was a bit underwhelming. Still, with her originality and wonderful writing, Cusk won me over for four solid stars.

[bobbieharv · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved Outline, haven't read Transit yet, but this was available from my library so read it out of order. I'm not sure it matters, given Cusk's plot-less technique, but I certainly recognized her unique style. If I had to say what she's trying to achieve, I'd hypothesize that she believes her protagonist can best be described by the many ways in which other people open up to her, and by what they reveal (quite a lot, as it happens!).She's a wonderful, meticulous writer, although this philosophy, if it is such, can be a little hard on the reader at times. When I reviewed Outline I quoted this line from Cusk: ". . . while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was."In Kudos, however, the protagonist has almost completely disappeared, leaving us at the mercy of those meticulously described characters. Only at the very end do we see her, swimming naked, in a disturbing scene with a fat, urinating man - a scene that didn't seem to fit the rest of the book.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I picked this up because this was one of the Tournament of Books Summer 2018 books. It is the 3rd in a series, I have no read (nor even heard of) the other two. So there's that. Apparently the judges thought it could stand on its own, so I went ahead. This book took forever to get from the library queue, despite the fact that there weren't that many holds (compared to other books, Circe for example). And it's only 232 pages! Now I know why it took so long. This books is sloooow. It took me over a week to slog through.This novel is most definitely not plot-driven. There really is no plot. But is it character-driven? Faye, the main character/narrator, is the person we know the least about. She is a writer, divorced and remarried, who has traveled to Italy for a literary conference. This book outlines her experiences there, but the bulk of the book is her listening to/narrating from memory the lives of people she meets. Staff, fellow authors, interviewers, her reps. That's it. Nothing really happens (she goes to dinner, meets a writer, hears about his life, goes to an interview, hears about the interviewers life, etc etc etc for the entire novel).I hate books like this. I would much rather read a plot-driven novel about any of the characters she meets than read about her describing them. I will not be reading the first two of this series.

[ozzer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Autofiction is a genre that inhabits a place between fiction and memoir. In KUDOS (OUTLINE and TRANSIT being the other two novels in this trilogy that I must confess to not having read), Cusk intelligently explores a broad array of interesting ideas. Having read the two previous novels would prepare one better for the experience of reading KUDOS because the traditional elements of the novel are not apparent. Yet KUDOS is a surprisingly compelling read. There is little plot, setting, dialogue, progression, or character development. Instead Faye, the protagonist who resembles Cusk, listens attentively to a random array of people who eagerly talk about themselves. Curiously, Cusk seems to believe that fiction’s approach to storytelling is moribund and in need of streamlining, yet the people Faye encounters in this novel seem especially fond of telling their stories.So what is on Cusk’s mind? First and foremost it is gender inequality. Clearly her views on this topic are cynical. In the final analysis, it is a man’s world where women are merely tolerated. The novel begins and ends with two misogynistic anecdotes that seem to symbolize her views. It opens with a self-absorbed fellow airline passenger who can’t seem to keep his legs out of the aisle showing little regard for the hard-working flight attendants. This guy clearly loves his dog more than his family. The novel ends with a more threatening image. Faye is swimming at an isolated beach at night when “a huge burly man with a great curling black beard and a rounded stomach and legs like hams” grasps “his thick penis and…urinate(s) into the water.” Other topics range far and wide, including the nature of freedom; identity in marriage and family; the many ways we delude ourselves with personal narratives; the failings of the literary lifestyle; the importance of suffering in the creation of art; the unstable state of European affairs; and especially how we fail to listen to each other.The meager plot involves Faye traveling the book circuit in unnamed European cities. Most of the people she meets are associated with the literary life. These people are Cusk’s unwitting victims and she is merciless. They are characterized by self-congratulation, smugness, loquaciousness, and eccentricity. One journalist, who is assigned to interview Faye, spends all of his time talking about himself but in the end concludes that he has got everything he needs to write the article. In another anecdote, a bestselling novelist plays down the importance of ideas and admits that “the whole point of it was to make money.” Cusk precedes each encounter with a colorful, often unflattering, physical description followed by a quick launch into their secret stories. After a few pages of this, the characters disappear from the novel never to be heard from again.Cusk’s presentation is controlled and clever, occasionally showing Faye interjecting expressionless humor and judgments that her characters never seem to get. Despite being filled with intriguing ideas and images, the novel often bogs down. Multiple unresolved conversations can be unsatisfying; the voices sound alike and seem to be a thinly disguised Cusk; the monologues seem superficial lacking interiority; and the anecdotal nature of the book makes many of the stories unmemorable.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There's not much plot to the final novel in Rachel Cusk's trilogy. A middle-aged woman author attends a few writers's conferences in Europe and has conversations with people. But the plot is beside the point, here the protagonist is almost absent, instead, she's a witness, someone who listens as others reveal themselves to her. And each person's monologue addresses in some way how children are affected by the relationship between parents. The format allows Cusk to come at this from different angles, from people discussing different things. This isn't a novel that makes writing about it easy, even as it looks at writers and publishing. I found the entire trilogy to be brilliant and to be doing something different within the confines of what we call fiction. While each book can be read separate from the others, what Cusk is doing here is best experienced by reading the entire trilogy. And having read Kudos, I'm ready to turn around and begin the process from the first book, to see what more is there.

[kayanelson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read the 3 books in the Outline trilogy back to back. By Kudos, I was getting a little bit tired of the writing style and felt like she was getting more and more philosophical throughout the progression of the books. Overall I liked all three books and thought the premise of the books was creative and different. I wonder how many times in all 3 books is Faye mentioned by name. We know her name is Faye but sometimes I think it's because her name is mentioned on the book jacket. Worthy of a mention is the ending of this book. What? It just doesn't fit. Why did she take this walk, why did she disrobe and go into the water and why did that last thing happen? I'm sure it was supposed to be metaphorical but it was a shock and felt like it didn't fit.All 3 books in the trilogy and worth a read, Outline, Transit and Kudos.

[miss.mesmerized · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Faye, a British writer, is on her way to a book conference somewhere in southern Europe. She is expected to give several interviews and to take part in social events. The people she meets all have a story to tell – and they do. Faye herself hardly ever talks, especially not about herself, she somehow makes people around her open up and share their thoughts with her. First, it’s the passenger seated next to her in the plane leaving London. Later she meets interviewers who much rather talk about themselves than about their interviewee, her publisher shares her thoughts on the book market and fellow authors who want to convey a certain image of themselves.“Kudos” is certainly a very special novel. I do not think I have ever read a book in which a first person narrator tells a story and at the end you ask yourself if you got only the slightest idea of the narrator herself. Faye hardly reveals anything, even though she is interviewed over and over again, we only know about a divorce and a son and the fact that she’s a writer – we do not even know what her current is actually about.Yet, I think Faye might have another function that providing a clear picture about herself. She is more like a canvas, she motivates other characters to paint themselves on her, she is their means for expression. This goes quite well with the title “Kudos”, praise for exceptional achievement or fame, especially in the arts. However, what has Faye done? We know nothing of her own achievement, she is well known for sure, but what exactly for remains in the dark. What we know is that her private life has not been that successful, the separation of her partner and a son who prefers to stay much rather with the father than with her. Only once, at the very end of the novel, is she in contact with him, but only because he cannot get in touch with his father and needs an adult to share his nightly disaster with.The things the characters share with Faye vary from professional fulfilment and familial shortcomings, over feminism to literature and its quality. Yet, their opinions are neither discussed not questioned, they are just statements that you can ponder. I do not really know what to make of this, I like characters sharing strong opinions on something and thinking about it, but I also appreciate if an author provides a kind of objection or agreement. “Kudos” is the concluding novel of Cusk’s trilogy which started with “Outline” in 2015 and continued 2016 with “Transit”. I haven’t read the previous ones thus I do not know if we get a better idea of her protagonist through them. However, I didn’t feel like having had to read them to enjoy “Kudos”. The novel is remarkable in several ways, it reveals a lot about human nature and in particular human narcissism. The words are carefully chosen and the sentences wisely constructed, the language is simply beautiful. All in all, an outstanding piece of art. Kudos for that.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For a third outing, Rachel Cusk’s Faye is once again the receptacle of other people’s tales of their lives’ trials and tribulations. This time Faye is attending a writers’ festival in an unnamed sunny European country. Mostly she encounters other writers, most of whom are significantly more famous than she is, or at least think they are. There are also publishers, arts journalists, event organizers, and more. Everyone seems to have their story to tell, though of Faye we learn little. Her son is growing up and her relationship with him and through him with his father seems to set the theme. For much of what Faye learns through her encounters is of broken relationships and how the women in them negotiate the dangers, emotional and physical, that arise in such situations. Especially, perhaps we hear of how children or the lack of children come to define and be defined by these relationships.At times humorous, often sad, but always very human, we see writers engaging with each other in the ways that such an unusually solitary discipline might suggest, i.e. awkwardly. But beneath the surface of competitive ego management, the writers and those who work in the industry that facilitates them are just people struggling with very similar problems to others. The writing here, as in the previous two works in this trilogy, remains quietly distanced, observant, always potentially ironic, and lucid. And yet, I find it immensely compelling. Kudos are warranted, indeed.Certainly recommended.

[danieljayfriedman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition -- I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything."—Rachel Cusk, OutlineMy personal reviewing guidelines include: if you can’t say something nice in a review, try not to say it; and if it’s going to be a negative review, don’t bother to write it. But NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux generously provided me with an ARC e-copy of Rachel Cusk’s Kudos in exchange for an honest review, so I feel duty-bound to review it. Before commenting on Kudos below, I’ll mention that I previously read Outline in 2015 and Transit in early 2017, but I neither reviewed nor rated them. (See above inspirational quote from Outline.) I did not reread them prior to reading Kudos: I wanted to determine if this final trilogy volume could stand independently in my mind.My reaction to Kudos bore limited resemblance to my reactions to Outline and Transit. Kudos’s Faye seemed more closed, contrived, and boring than Outline and Transit’s Faye. Cusk’s much-vaunted annilihated perspective compelled me through Outline and Transit, even though I felt that Henry Green had annilihated his perspective with more verve and humor decades earlier. But in Kudos, Cusk’s annilihated perspective sometimes seemed more like bloodless, too-cool-for-school detachment and disdain: annilihated perspective or annilihated emotions? Kudos’ characters apparent scorn for festivals, book awards, literary journalists, writing retreats, literary patrons, and readers—expressed with more humor in Edward St. Aubyn’s Lost for Words—seemed only mildly amusing in Kudos. (Of course, Rachel Cusk is a fine novelist and I refuse to infer that her characters’ disdain hints of any similar disdain on her own part.) Surely, Cusk doesn’t think that ”’My wife’s a big reader,’ he said. ‘She belongs to one of those book clubs.’” represents a typical response of a reader or a reader’s spouse to current literature. Surely, Cusk doesn’t share the disdain of Faye’s publisher for her fellow authors: ”Certain people could not accept that what they regarded as their entitlement to have whatever they chose to write—whether or not others wished to read it—put into print year after year had been questioned.” Surely, Cusk does not begrudge publishers or novelists the need to earn livings: ”What all publishers were looking for, he went on—the holy grail, as it were, of the modern literary scene—were those writers who performed well in the market while maintaining a connection to the values of literature; in other words, who wrote books that people could actually enjoy without feeling in the least demeaned by being seen reading them.” (In my own defense, I’ll admit here that I could safely read my copy of Kudos in public without fear of embarrassment, since its title was not visible on my e-reader to anyone looking over my shoulder.) Do publishers really give monologues to their authors as in Kudos? Or do young guides and college students studying math and science such as the loquacious Hermann comment that ”he was aware that many of what appeared to him as rational challenges appeared to other people as metaphors” or ”the serpent’s role is merely to create a viewpoint from which Adam and Eve’s weaknesses can be observed, and thus the snake might be representative of anything that triangulates the relationship of two identities, such as the arrival of a child might triangulate its parents.” Of course, Cusk hasn’t lost her ability to skewer. Here, the perpetually touring novelist, Linda, recounting a telephone conversation with her husband: ”’We talked for a while and then there was this silence and eventually he said, what can I do for you.’” And Cusk also hasn’t lost her taste for amusing but mysterious epigrams: ”History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path, whereas childhood kills the roots. And that is the poison, she said, that seeps into the soil.”In reading and then thinking about Rachel Cusk’s Kudos, I’m torn between either wondering if it would interest readers not already immersed in following the small literary world of awards, festivals, conferences, and signings, and or admiring Cusk for daring to scorn her readers.Kudos is often sarcastic and amusing, and populated with interesting if unbelievable monologues, interesting if barely credible characters, and interesting if sometimes mysterious epigrams, but is this enough to sustain a novel by a writer of Rachel Cusk’s talent and rank?3.5 stars

[pgchuis · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.This is my least favourite of the trilogy of Outline novels; somehow I found it less humorous and harder-going than the others. Faye is still her enigmatic self, going to various writers' festivals and conferences and being interviewed, in this instalment in the run up to and immediately after the Brexit referendum. The blurb suggested to me that Brexit would feature more than it in fact did; instead most of the conversations Faye has with people focus on feminism, and the roles of men and women, and whether they are or should be different.At various times, however hard I tried, I could not grasp the leap characters seemed to make between on the one hand freedom or suffering or their own personal circumstances and morality on the other. Faye as ever keeps her own counsel.My favourite parts were the initial encounter with the retired owner of Pilot the dog, and the story told by the interviewer of her relationship with her sister. I was touched by Faye's affection for her sons, and this was of course beautifully written.